Apples and Cake
by saidtheirnevers
Summary: It was something about her feverish state that made her like this, so suddenly, so abruptly. Misa-fic, about the day she commits suicide.


**saidtheirnevers**

Okay, so this just basically spawned from a feeling I had not too long ago; I wasn't hungry, but I couldn't stop eating. It's how I've been for a while (since, like, birth), and it's a hard state to get out of...so I gave a part of my feelings to Misa, in the hopes that I can cure myself of the guilty feelings I always get whenever I stuff myself.

* * *

It was something about her feverish state that made her like this, so suddenly, so abruptly.

Yes, Misa thought as her pale, bloodless fingers clasped the air, searching for something, anything, to hold onto, yes, it was the sickness her body carried. The horrible, horrible sickness. The old Misa-Misa never got sick, but then she did, one time, get very, very ill, and no medicine could cure what she had, and now even her physical sense was sick.

If only, if only.

She hadn't eaten in a while, had she? Everything she'd ever read about nutrition told her, told her very, very specifically--"Never go more than four or five hours without eating; it puts your body in famine mode, and it will cause you to overeat and hold onto the fat." She knew she had to eat, but she just wasn't hungry, she wasn't hungry at all.

Or was she? She wasn't entirely certain; she knew she had definitely gotten a little thinner, a little paler, since her face became flushed and her forehead got hot and her taste buds went awry; she didn't know, she just didn't know anymore, not anything, but most importantly she didn't know when she had eaten last, or how much. She always lost weight whenever she got sick, and then she had to eat more because nobody likes a little blonde girl with sunken cheeks and bluish-whitish skin; nobody likes a sick little Misa with sad eyes and a heart that won't beat fast enough.

She lied in her bed for what felt like minutes but could have been hours, maybe days; she just never could put together a cogent string of thoughts, not anymore, not since she got sick. And how long ago was that, she wondered, because it could have been a few days, but it felt like a few months, and for all she knew she'd been locked inside her apartment for years and would never have felt a thing. It was so stupid of her, she realized, to think that she could live for years without eating; what did it matter, because she was stupid anyway. It was what he always thought of her, and it was why he always kept her around.

No, that was wrong. He may have loved her, once, perhaps. Maybe for one minute, one second even, one infinitesimal moment, he could have loved her, could have seen her as something other than another dumb blonde ripe for the manipulating. She knew he was always just a lie, she knew it so well, too well, now that he was dead and now that she couldn't get back at him for it, now that she couldn't grab whatever it was she vaguely remembered using to do bad things to people, and make him suffer. Now, when she was a helpless, sick little girl, and it was his fault, and he didn't even care. He couldn't even care.

She stared at the ceiling, or what might have been the ceiling. Maybe she was on the ceiling, staring at the floor--no, that was a stupid thought as well. The world would right itself once she stood up, but her forehead was too hot, her body too cold. She forced herself to sit up, forced herself after many, many failed attempts to glance over at her reflection in the mirror. Misa-Misa wasn't so pretty with a blotchy face and puffy eyes and no makeup and nothing with which to make her beautiful. Misa-Misa was never beautiful anyway; all that was just a facade; she had to be pretty on the outside so nobody would ever, ever see how absolutely terrifying she looked on the inside.

Was she hungry? Her mind screamed Yes, but her body screamed No. Misa had never been one to listen to what her body wanted; she sometimes refused to eat when she was hungry, and that had led to a big, big-big catastrophe when she was seventeen; she'd never really understood why she was taken to a hospital, or why her face was on the covers of magazines, or why any of it, but she'd learned how to take care of herself, and although she sometimes forgot that her mind had to, had to had to, listen to what her body wanted, she never got that bad-kind-of attention ever again.

So Misa forced herself up, and though she shivered against the cold, cold air--it was summer, wasn't it? Or was she really only just hallucinating?--she merely hugged herself and continued to the kitchen. There was a basket of fruit, just sitting there, untouched; everything was shiny and ripe, and Misa might have stopped to think that if the fruit wasn't rotten, she couldn't be really _that_ sick, but she didn't, and it wasn't until much later that she actually did, and by then it was already too, too late; she was still sick other places, after all. There was an apple, and it reminded her of someone, not someone close but someone slightly life-altering, or perhaps very life-altering; she never really stopped feeling that something was missing from her life, but that was why she was sick.

She bit into the apple--Cameo it said on the sticker--and let the juices run down her chin, let them run and drip to the floor like the tears she never cried, like the blood she never let herself spill, like the gasoline she'd never touch for fear that-- she was hungry after all, very, very hungry. The apple was gone in seconds, and before Misa fully had control--she never really had control anyway, why now?--her hands were pulling the tops off the boxes of chocolate she received earlier that day--two of them, and it was today but she didn't really know that, because she was sick, so very, very sick, and the fever wasn't just in her forehead--and before she could stop herself, or even think about stopping herself, her fingers wrapped around the chocolates and shoved them down her throat, even the ones whose insides tasted like crap, even the ones which didn't mix well with the others; she shoveled them into her mouth two, three at a time, and she just couldn't stop because she was hungry she was hungry and that was absolutely all she could think about because something was wrong and she didn't feel like herself and she was _hungry_.

Halfway through the cake--good cake, too, white, with white icing and strawberry filling and strawberries on top, fresh strawberries--her hands were covered with chocolate and the fillings of the chewy ones and the icing from the cake and the cake itself, and they were dirty, dirty, dirty, and the telephone was ringing and her head hurt and maybe the phone was still silent and it was her ears ringing, and she realized that she was still too hungry, too too hungry for it to be food she wanted. She didn't care that the cake had never done anything to her; she pushed it off the counter and watched as it landed face-down on the kitchen floor with a satisfying _splat_. Perhaps, if Misa covered herself with cake, and if she fell off a counter, her _splat_ would be just as glorious, just as interesting to watch. Or maybe, because Misa was a celebrity, her _splat_ would be beautiful no matter what she put on. Cake might still be best, though--cake and apples; they somehow had a significance, though she couldn't fathom exactly why cake and apples would go well together.

It was a few minutes--hours?--later that Misa had on her best dress, pretty stockings, and high heels. Her face was made up to hide the girl beneath the glory. Her hair was carefully styled, with ribbons and ties and a beautiful shine. She held an apple in one hand, a handful of the demolished cake in the other. Slowly, with her elbows, she pushed the curtain aside to reveal the sunlit sky--was it really day? She thought it was still night, or maybe simply night again after all these years. She kicked the window forcefully; it did not break. She knew she couldn't uninstall it with her elbows--silly Misa, that would just be stupid!--and she couldn't bring herself to put down the cake or the apple.

She was dressed in so much white anyway; it seemed a shame not to let the beautiful crimson share its patterns. Perhaps she was just sick, and that was what was giving her these wondrous, amazing, magnificent thoughts, but she stopped feeling cold and hot and anything at all really...and she took a moment, before she jumped from the fifth story, to reflect, consciously, on her decision.

All the way down, Misa grinned. It had been her feverish state all along.


End file.
